Monday, July 26, 2004
Who We Are:
* Nearly 18 percent of the Florida's population are elderly. By the mid-2020s at the latest, the United States as a whole will have an age structure as old as that of Florida today.
* “The number of Americans under the control of the criminal justice system grew by 130,700 last year to reach a new high of nearly 6.9 million, according to a Justice Department report released today.
The total includes people in jail and prison as well as those on probation and parole. This is about 3.2 percent of the adult population in the United States, the report said.” http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/26/national/26parole.html
* There’s been a 17% drop in real U.S. wages between 1972 and 1992. A 17% decline amounts to an awfully big pay cut; it rivals the plummet in wages during the Great Depression, though this period is twice as long. Confirming word is supplied by the Bureau of Labor Statistics that can be found here. http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/surveymost?ce
* Nearly Half of All Presidential Voters Have Seen or Plan to See Fahrenheit 911, according to Hollywood stats.
Nearly half of the American electorate has seen or plans to see Fahrenheit 911, Michael Moore’s film critique of the Bush Administration, before the November elections, a new survey revealed today.
The film is the most viewed commercial documentary in American film history and held at a strong number #2 box office position this week after breaking records during its opening week.
Movie-goers and intended movie-goers represent a broad and diverse slice of the electorate and spread across the country, including the so-called battleground states. Fully 23% of voters who intend to see the film self-identify as Bush voters, while another 10% say they are supporting Nader or undecided. Forty one percent of potential movie viewers reside in battleground states, which mirrors the national average of 40% of voters residing in battleground states. http://www.moviecitynews.com/notepad/2004/040707_pr.html
9/11 Commission: Charles / Charley Pierce’s take
So, it was the acronyms who did it.
CIA, FBI, NSC, but not the NSA, God knows. DOT. DoD. The acronyms did it. Fire all the acronyms
I don't know at what point my head exploded. Maybe it was when Tom Kean was complimenting Bill O'Reilly on the latter's analytical abilities, or when Condi Rice was waxing all serious with Sean Hannity. Maybe it was earlier, when Lee Hamilton suggested that nobody was reading enough Tom Clancy. (After yesterday, and given the dive he took 20 years ago on Iran-Contra, Hamilton is now the Greg Louganis of the national security state.) I mean, Christ's sweet name, a failure of imagination? Not on the part of Gary Hart or Warren Rudman or Al Gore, or Coleen Rowley, or the people in Phoenix, or poor, dead John O'Neill. Their imaginations didn't fail. In fact, the single most preposterous part of yesterday's report was its tsk-tsking of how the recommendations of previous commissions were ignored. Who ignored them?
Nobody.
It was the acronyms.
Everybody's guilty so nobody is.
Read the footnotes, and remember, every time a conversation with either George Bush or Dick Cheney is cited, that this testimony was not given under oath, and under circumstances that were flatly bizarre, and that the testimony was given by two men who fought hard against the very existence of the commission, especially the former, who has made no mistake that he can recall, and is not specifically contradicted in any way by this report. Instead, it was an exercise designed -- as was the Tower Commission before it -- to reassure us that the problem is in structural institutional details, and not in the men tasked to do great deeds for us so that we don't strain ourselves in the exercise of self-government. (To his everlasting credit, Bob Kerrey seemed to be rather pissed on this very point.)
I, for one, completely trust the administration that brought Elliott Abrams back into public service, hired John Ashcroft and Ted Olson to oversee the Justice Department, and continues to employ Paul Wolfowitz to appoint a new "Intelligence Czar," essentially handing to that person a job it took J. Edgar Hoover 50 years to build for himself. I'm feeling very bipartisan about that.
Also, the Democratic people better get ready. The report may be bipartisan, but it's political utility won't be. If the specific blame isn't in the report, it's going to be part of the campaign whether John Kerry wants it to be or not. After all, this fall, we all get to decide whether, finally, after more than three years, somebody besides 300,000 baggage handlers will actually lose a job behind the atrocities of September 11, 2001.http://msnbc.msn.com/id/3449870/
NY Times editorial on Administration’s Iraqi Prison Scandal
A newly released report by the Army's inspector general shows that Mr. Rumsfeld's team may be turning over stones, but it's not looking under them.
The authors of this 300-page whitewash say they found no "systemic" problem - even though there were 94 documented cases of prisoner abuse, including some 40 deaths, 20 of them homicides; even though only four prisons of the 16 they visited had copies of the Geneva Conventions; even though Abu Ghraib was a cesspool with one shower for every 50 inmates; even though the military police were improperly involved in interrogations; even though young people plucked from civilian life were sent to guard prisoners - 50,000 of them in all - with no training.
Never mind any of that. The report pins most of the blame on those depressingly familiar culprits, a few soldiers who behaved badly. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/24/opinion/24sat1.html
Plame Scandal:
The clock is ticking. July is almost over and still no word on the prosecution. Can this investigation be taking 18 months to decide on indictments? In the meantime, there’s been a bevy of information / articles targeting Joe Wilson, an indication that the Administration remains nervous.
What’s Happening, Iraq: Abductions http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/26/international/middleeast/26iraq.html?hp
Not everyone wants Jenna Bush to teach in Harlem.
Artists and Activists United for Peace, a black and Latino public-action group, plans to express its displeasure with the First Daughter at a rally on Sept. 2, during the Republican National Convention."We don't think she is of a high enough moral character to teach school, considering her past adventures," said group organizer John Penley. "Her taking this job is keeping a black person from getting the job. We think she and her sister should enlist in the military." Past adventures including two alleged abortions, an arrest for underage drinking, getting high with Ashton Kutcher, and swanning around the South of France drinking $250 bottles of vodka.http://www.nydailynews.com/news/gossip/story/214820p-184984c.html
''Man, that's all it took to buy the country?''
Above average piece in the NY Times magazine on the efforts to build a wired progressive infrastructure that can counter the Right’s Noise Machine of Rush/O’Reilly, Weekly Standard, Murdoch et al. Lots of entrepreneurial types who are prepared to commit millions in the belief that liberal politics needs to be rejuvenated outside of the traditional Democratic party http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/25/magazine/25DEMOCRATS.html
Polls: Still even. I’ll give it a rest till Kerry’s possible bounce can be measured.
Los Angeles Times: Kerry: 46, Bush 44%
Fox News: Bush 44%, Kerry 44%
USA Today/CNN/Gallup: Kerry 47%, Bush 46%
Quinnipiac: Kerry leading Bush, 46% to 43%.
AP analysis: Kerry "narrowly trails" Bush in the electoral tally
Missouri: Kerry 46%, Bush 44% (Kansas City Star)
Bush: 48%, Kerry 48% (Gallup)
Florida: Kerry 46%, Bush 46% (Sayfie)
Bush 48%, Kerry 46% (Mason-Dixon)
Bush 48%, Kerry 46% (Orlando Sentinel)
Kerry 49%, Bush 44% (Research 2000)
Bush 45%, Kerry 44%, Nader 2% (LA Times)
New Hampshire: Kerry 50%, Bush 45% (Granite State Poll)
Kerry 49 Bush 44 (Gallup)
Kerry 47%, Bush 45% (American Research Group)
Ohio: Bush 48%, Kerry 43% (Strategic Vision)
Kerry 47 Bush 45 (ARG)
Bush 47 Kerry 44 Nader 2 (Columbus Dispatch)
Kerry 47%, Bush 45% (American Research Group)
Pennsylvania: Kerry 48%, Bush 43% (Strategic Vision)
Oregon: Kerry 50%, Bush 42% (American Research Group)
Superstores, Good and Bad.
I’m no fan of them, but have come to realize they’re not all equal.
Wal-Mart Funds Bush, Costco Backs Kerry Financing '04 Campaign
Executives at Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Costco Wholesale Corp., competitors in the $76 billion U.S. warehouse-club market, have taken their rivalry to a new level: national politics.
Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer and owner of Sam's Club warehouse stores, gives more money to Republican candidates than any other company. Its top three managers, including Chief Executive Officer H. Lee Scott, donated the individual maximum $2,000 to President George W. Bush, and Jay Allen, vice president for corporate affairs, raised at least $100,000 to re-elect the president, earning him the Bush campaign's designation of ``Pioneer.''
Wal-Mart -- two-thirds of whose 3,580 stores are in the ``red states'' that voted for Bush in 2000 -- is backing White House policies on everything from trade to limiting overtime pay.
Costco CEO Jim Sinegal, 68, is a Democrat who says Bush's $1.7 trillion in tax cuts unfairly benefit the wealthy. He opposed the Iraq war and supports Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts for president. And he's the only chief executive of a company in the Standard & Poor's 500 Index to donate money to independent political groups formed to oust Bush, Internal Revenue Service records show. http://quote.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000103&sid=amSB.R0Q2nAQ&refer=us#
-R
* Nearly 18 percent of the Florida's population are elderly. By the mid-2020s at the latest, the United States as a whole will have an age structure as old as that of Florida today.
* “The number of Americans under the control of the criminal justice system grew by 130,700 last year to reach a new high of nearly 6.9 million, according to a Justice Department report released today.
The total includes people in jail and prison as well as those on probation and parole. This is about 3.2 percent of the adult population in the United States, the report said.” http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/26/national/26parole.html
* There’s been a 17% drop in real U.S. wages between 1972 and 1992. A 17% decline amounts to an awfully big pay cut; it rivals the plummet in wages during the Great Depression, though this period is twice as long. Confirming word is supplied by the Bureau of Labor Statistics that can be found here. http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/surveymost?ce
* Nearly Half of All Presidential Voters Have Seen or Plan to See Fahrenheit 911, according to Hollywood stats.
Nearly half of the American electorate has seen or plans to see Fahrenheit 911, Michael Moore’s film critique of the Bush Administration, before the November elections, a new survey revealed today.
The film is the most viewed commercial documentary in American film history and held at a strong number #2 box office position this week after breaking records during its opening week.
Movie-goers and intended movie-goers represent a broad and diverse slice of the electorate and spread across the country, including the so-called battleground states. Fully 23% of voters who intend to see the film self-identify as Bush voters, while another 10% say they are supporting Nader or undecided. Forty one percent of potential movie viewers reside in battleground states, which mirrors the national average of 40% of voters residing in battleground states. http://www.moviecitynews.com/notepad/2004/040707_pr.html
9/11 Commission: Charles / Charley Pierce’s take
So, it was the acronyms who did it.
CIA, FBI, NSC, but not the NSA, God knows. DOT. DoD. The acronyms did it. Fire all the acronyms
I don't know at what point my head exploded. Maybe it was when Tom Kean was complimenting Bill O'Reilly on the latter's analytical abilities, or when Condi Rice was waxing all serious with Sean Hannity. Maybe it was earlier, when Lee Hamilton suggested that nobody was reading enough Tom Clancy. (After yesterday, and given the dive he took 20 years ago on Iran-Contra, Hamilton is now the Greg Louganis of the national security state.) I mean, Christ's sweet name, a failure of imagination? Not on the part of Gary Hart or Warren Rudman or Al Gore, or Coleen Rowley, or the people in Phoenix, or poor, dead John O'Neill. Their imaginations didn't fail. In fact, the single most preposterous part of yesterday's report was its tsk-tsking of how the recommendations of previous commissions were ignored. Who ignored them?
Nobody.
It was the acronyms.
Everybody's guilty so nobody is.
Read the footnotes, and remember, every time a conversation with either George Bush or Dick Cheney is cited, that this testimony was not given under oath, and under circumstances that were flatly bizarre, and that the testimony was given by two men who fought hard against the very existence of the commission, especially the former, who has made no mistake that he can recall, and is not specifically contradicted in any way by this report. Instead, it was an exercise designed -- as was the Tower Commission before it -- to reassure us that the problem is in structural institutional details, and not in the men tasked to do great deeds for us so that we don't strain ourselves in the exercise of self-government. (To his everlasting credit, Bob Kerrey seemed to be rather pissed on this very point.)
I, for one, completely trust the administration that brought Elliott Abrams back into public service, hired John Ashcroft and Ted Olson to oversee the Justice Department, and continues to employ Paul Wolfowitz to appoint a new "Intelligence Czar," essentially handing to that person a job it took J. Edgar Hoover 50 years to build for himself. I'm feeling very bipartisan about that.
Also, the Democratic people better get ready. The report may be bipartisan, but it's political utility won't be. If the specific blame isn't in the report, it's going to be part of the campaign whether John Kerry wants it to be or not. After all, this fall, we all get to decide whether, finally, after more than three years, somebody besides 300,000 baggage handlers will actually lose a job behind the atrocities of September 11, 2001.http://msnbc.msn.com/id/3449870/
NY Times editorial on Administration’s Iraqi Prison Scandal
A newly released report by the Army's inspector general shows that Mr. Rumsfeld's team may be turning over stones, but it's not looking under them.
The authors of this 300-page whitewash say they found no "systemic" problem - even though there were 94 documented cases of prisoner abuse, including some 40 deaths, 20 of them homicides; even though only four prisons of the 16 they visited had copies of the Geneva Conventions; even though Abu Ghraib was a cesspool with one shower for every 50 inmates; even though the military police were improperly involved in interrogations; even though young people plucked from civilian life were sent to guard prisoners - 50,000 of them in all - with no training.
Never mind any of that. The report pins most of the blame on those depressingly familiar culprits, a few soldiers who behaved badly. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/24/opinion/24sat1.html
Plame Scandal:
The clock is ticking. July is almost over and still no word on the prosecution. Can this investigation be taking 18 months to decide on indictments? In the meantime, there’s been a bevy of information / articles targeting Joe Wilson, an indication that the Administration remains nervous.
What’s Happening, Iraq: Abductions http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/26/international/middleeast/26iraq.html?hp
Not everyone wants Jenna Bush to teach in Harlem.
Artists and Activists United for Peace, a black and Latino public-action group, plans to express its displeasure with the First Daughter at a rally on Sept. 2, during the Republican National Convention."We don't think she is of a high enough moral character to teach school, considering her past adventures," said group organizer John Penley. "Her taking this job is keeping a black person from getting the job. We think she and her sister should enlist in the military." Past adventures including two alleged abortions, an arrest for underage drinking, getting high with Ashton Kutcher, and swanning around the South of France drinking $250 bottles of vodka.http://www.nydailynews.com/news/gossip/story/214820p-184984c.html
''Man, that's all it took to buy the country?''
Above average piece in the NY Times magazine on the efforts to build a wired progressive infrastructure that can counter the Right’s Noise Machine of Rush/O’Reilly, Weekly Standard, Murdoch et al. Lots of entrepreneurial types who are prepared to commit millions in the belief that liberal politics needs to be rejuvenated outside of the traditional Democratic party http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/25/magazine/25DEMOCRATS.html
Polls: Still even. I’ll give it a rest till Kerry’s possible bounce can be measured.
Los Angeles Times: Kerry: 46, Bush 44%
Fox News: Bush 44%, Kerry 44%
USA Today/CNN/Gallup: Kerry 47%, Bush 46%
Quinnipiac: Kerry leading Bush, 46% to 43%.
AP analysis: Kerry "narrowly trails" Bush in the electoral tally
Missouri: Kerry 46%, Bush 44% (Kansas City Star)
Bush: 48%, Kerry 48% (Gallup)
Florida: Kerry 46%, Bush 46% (Sayfie)
Bush 48%, Kerry 46% (Mason-Dixon)
Bush 48%, Kerry 46% (Orlando Sentinel)
Kerry 49%, Bush 44% (Research 2000)
Bush 45%, Kerry 44%, Nader 2% (LA Times)
New Hampshire: Kerry 50%, Bush 45% (Granite State Poll)
Kerry 49 Bush 44 (Gallup)
Kerry 47%, Bush 45% (American Research Group)
Ohio: Bush 48%, Kerry 43% (Strategic Vision)
Kerry 47 Bush 45 (ARG)
Bush 47 Kerry 44 Nader 2 (Columbus Dispatch)
Kerry 47%, Bush 45% (American Research Group)
Pennsylvania: Kerry 48%, Bush 43% (Strategic Vision)
Oregon: Kerry 50%, Bush 42% (American Research Group)
Superstores, Good and Bad.
I’m no fan of them, but have come to realize they’re not all equal.
Wal-Mart Funds Bush, Costco Backs Kerry Financing '04 Campaign
Executives at Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Costco Wholesale Corp., competitors in the $76 billion U.S. warehouse-club market, have taken their rivalry to a new level: national politics.
Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer and owner of Sam's Club warehouse stores, gives more money to Republican candidates than any other company. Its top three managers, including Chief Executive Officer H. Lee Scott, donated the individual maximum $2,000 to President George W. Bush, and Jay Allen, vice president for corporate affairs, raised at least $100,000 to re-elect the president, earning him the Bush campaign's designation of ``Pioneer.''
Wal-Mart -- two-thirds of whose 3,580 stores are in the ``red states'' that voted for Bush in 2000 -- is backing White House policies on everything from trade to limiting overtime pay.
Costco CEO Jim Sinegal, 68, is a Democrat who says Bush's $1.7 trillion in tax cuts unfairly benefit the wealthy. He opposed the Iraq war and supports Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts for president. And he's the only chief executive of a company in the Standard & Poor's 500 Index to donate money to independent political groups formed to oust Bush, Internal Revenue Service records show. http://quote.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000103&sid=amSB.R0Q2nAQ&refer=us#
-R
